Leading the Way: Education Secretary Patrick Tutwiler’s mission

State Education Secretary Patrick Tutwiler is on a three-step mission to reinvigorate learning in Massachusetts:

Stabilize. Heal. Transform.

It’s an approach that reflects the challenges and needs of the state’s education community, from pre-K to higher education.

But in a recent interview with Tutwiler, it was clear that he’s also using other strategies. Among them:

Share. Praise. Spread big ideas.

We’ll start with sharing.

Ask Tutwiler what drew him to education, and he talks about his mother. She worked as a school counselor at a community college in Illinois. Tutwiler mentions his brother who was an early educator and became an administrator at a Head Start program in Kansas. 

Tutwiler also tells the story of standing in the old Barnes and Noble in Brookline’s Coolidge Corner neighborhood reading a 1997 book by Jean Anyon called “Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform,” that points to the poverty and racial isolation that harm city schools.

He had just graduated from Holy Cross, and he was looking for a career.

“I pretty much read that book cover to cover at the store and found myself touched by and, in some ways, angered by what I saw of student experiences in the schools in Newark,” Tutwiler recalls. “And I began to draw parallels between what was described in the book and my own experiences.”

That book sparked a long career. Tutwiler went on to become a history teacher, an assistant headmaster, a dean of students, and a principal in public schools in and around Boston. He was for seven years the superintendent of the Lynn public schools. He earned a master’s degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and a PhD from Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development.

Today, Tutwiler’s vision for early education fits into the stabilize, heal, transform strategy and draws on his contact with early educators, including at our Advocacy Network’s Reception for Reflection.

“We use the terms stabilize and heal intentionally to underscore that we’re still in a recovery space,” he says. “As I’ve been visiting providers across the state over the last eight or nine months, I’ve heard a lot about staffing challenges. I’ve heard a lot about the mental health challenges that manifest in the form of children’s dysregulated behavior, and how that sometimes impacts staffing challenges.” 

“If you look at the governor’s budget,” he adds, “there are stabilization efforts that jump off the page like maintaining the C3 grants. This is a significant stabilizer in the early education space in terms of keeping programs open.”

“We’re also trying to make a value-based statement about the ability of families to access childcare close to their homes. And we really took a step forward based on our belief that pre-K should be universal, starting with an investment of a little more than a $20 million investment in the Commonwealth Preschool Partnership Initiative, which supports partnerships between districts and local providers to create pre-K opportunities.”

What Tutwiler praises is the leadership of Amy Kershaw, commissioner of the Department of Early Education and Care (EEC).

“Talk about alignment — it is there between the Executive Office of Education and EEC,” Tutwiler says. “One of the many things that I appreciate about Commissioner Kershaw’s leadership is that at every board meeting, whether they are talking about a challenge or a proposal, you consistently hear the words ‘stakeholder input.’ That is the centerpiece of her leadership. And that’s the way to do it. We should not be sitting in back rooms behind closed doors coming up with things. That’s not leadership, and those ideas usually fail.” 

Ask Tutwiler about racial achievement gaps, and he quickly describes a much bigger, more inspiring idea. 

“I think it’s important to say that the framing around gaps needs to shift. Because if you look at the most recent MCAS data, you could say definitively that the gaps, particularly between students of color and white students, have decreased. But that’s only because some student performance went down.

“I prefer to lift up this idea of establishing a north star that we want every student to achieve and that we have specific, targeted strategies to help each student get there. That’s where the equity conversation begins for me, because not everybody needs the same thing to get to that north star. It’s about how we effectively create mechanisms, pathways, and employ strategies, so that every student gets to that north star.”

Time was running out, but we squeezed in a final question, asking Tutwiler about his brother, the early educator.

“I’ll give you a fun fact about Tim,” Tutwiler says. “I’m six-foot-four, and Tim, my older brother, same parents, is five-six.”

“That’s the reason why I worked so hard in basketball. Not because I loved it, but because he used to beat me at the game and then tease me about it all the way home. So, I practiced and practiced, and then I started growing. My whole goal was to beat him, which I did at 17.”

The moral of this story, as we see it, is that with dedication, hard work, and a warm sense of humor, we can all help to stabilize, heal, and transform education.